Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/132

78 understanding consisted in an incapacity of forming, on disputable points, those decided and fixed opinions which can alone impart either force or consistency to intellectual character. For remedying this weakness, the religious controversies, and the civil wars recently engendered by the Reformation, were but ill calculated. The minds of the most serious men, all over Christendom, must have been then unsettled in an extraordinary degree; and where any predisposition to scepticism existed, every external circumstance must have conspired to cherish and confirm it. Of the extent to which it was carried, about the same period, in England, some judgment may be formed from the following description of a Sceptic by a writer not many years posterior to Montaigne.

“A sceptic in religion is one that hangs in the balance with all sorts of opinions; whereof not one but stirs him, and none sways him. A man guiltier of credulity than he is taken to be; for it is out of his belief of everything that he believes nothing. Each religion scares him from its contrary, none persuades him to itself. He would be wholly a Christian, but that he is something of an Atheist; and wholly an Atheist, but that he is partly a Christian; and a perfect Heretic, but that there are so many to distract him. He finds reason in all opinions, truth in none; indeed, the least reason perplexes him, and the best will not satisfy hm. He finds doubts and scruples better than resolves them, and is always too hard for himself.” If this portrait had been presented to Montaigne, I have little doubt that he would have had the candour to acknowledge, that he recognized in it some of the most prominent and characteristical features of his own mind.

The most elaborate, and seemingly the most serious, of all Montaigne’s essays, is his long and somewhat tedious Apology for Raimond de Sebonde, contained in the twelfth chapter of his second book. This author appears, from Montaigne’s account, to have been a Spaniard, who professed physic at Thoulouse, towards the end of the fourteenth century; and who published a treatise, entitled Theologia Naturalis, which was put into the hands of Montaigne’s father by a friend, as a useful antidote against the innovations with which Luther was then beginning to disturb the ancient faith. That, in this particular instance, the

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